Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was a Polish poet and aphorist. According to Clifton Fadimon's introduction to Lec's book Unkempt Thoughts:

Lec has led the strange (to us), hunted, haunted life of thousands of Central European intellectuals, their experience inexorably shaped by war and revolution. At the outbreak of the war he was imprisoned in a German concentration camp. There he stayed until July 1943 when the camp was liquidated by mass executions. Escaping in a German uniform, he succeeded in reaching Warsaw where he joined the underground fighters. After the war he continued his writing, varying his career by brief service as cultural attache of the Polish Embassy in Vienna. He has also spent two years in Israel. (The Embassy was Communist during the period of Stalinism in Poland, when the diplomats were carefully selected and controlled.)

Quotations / Aphorisms

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

Do not make gods in your own images.

There are parodies of non-existent things.

Do I have no soul as punishment for not believing in the soul?

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?

Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God.

You can change your faith without changing gods. And vice versa.

The finger of God never leaves identical fingerprints.

In the beginning there was the Word -- at the end just the Cliché.

Every bush can burn if you fire it with your imagination.

What do I believe? I believe in God, if he exists.

Do I believe? God only knows.

There is a dispute about the existence of God. Both sides try to hide that they killed Him -- even before He came into being.

All Gods were immortal.

The spirit of the times can haunt even the atheists.

An error becomes an error when born as truth.

Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.

Let him who is without guild cast the first stone. A trap. Because then he will be no longer without guilt.

Witches admitted their relations with the devil. Our blood boils -- how could they be forced to admit this when there is no devil. But reason tells us this is not true. The devil does exist and was in fact the inquisitor.

How many prison years in the years since Christ!

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

To god what is God's, to Caesar what is Caesar's. To humans -- what?

Many who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lamppost.

Burning stakes do not lighten the darkness.

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles mine.

You cannot play the Song of Freedom on an instrument of oppression.

Value your words. Each one may be the last.

"Oh to be old again," said a young corpse.

The consumer's side of the coffin lid isn't showy.

The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him.

In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

Even a glass eye can see its blindness.

To whom should we marry Freedom, to make it multiply?

I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.

Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?